American Radical Inheritances: From Kenneth Rexroth to Coretta Scott King
Before the Beats, Before MLK: Two Undeterred American Lives
Kenneth Rexroth Saw The High Water Mark Where the Wave Finally Broke
When was the last time you picked up a thick book, and cancelled everything you planned for the weekend, because nothing was more important than racing to the end?
An Autobiographical Novel, by Kenneth Rexroth
I lucked out— I discovered the most extraordinary memoir by the poet/translator later known as “King of the Beats” — Kenneth Rexroth. I started reading it out loud to my partner, and then he got hooked, too. Now it’s your turn.
While Rexroth’s later life is California legend, his 1905-1927 youth is the subject of his memoir. It is a “you-are-there” anthropological account that, if there was any justice, would be part of every American high school history class.
When Doubleday first published KR’s life story, they insisted on adding the word “Novel” to the title because they were afraid of getting sued by . . . everyone. You understand the controversy from the first page. He wrote it when he was only 22, and you can barely keep up.
Long before Rexroth was counseling Ginsburg on Howl, or getting parodied by Kerouac, he was a boy in what used to be “bustling” Terre Haute, Indiana. An abolitionist stronghold! Terre Haute was home of Eugene Debs, the roaring labor-first socialist who drank on the family’s front porch.
Later, teenage Kenneth found himself in the heart of the arts and political renaissance of Chicago with Carl Sandberg, Sherwood Anderson, and a host of other people who were a lot more interesting, if absent from the pages of Wikipedia. “The Duke,” as Kenneth was nicknamed by the neighborhood gang, does not spare us the sex, the violence, the hard cuts, the lost generation after the war.
Kenneth was an orphan before puberty. He was born into rather reckless luxury and later cast into the slum and the brothel. He was an autodidact of the first water, a proto-homeschooler, a numbers runner, a popcorn shark, who witnessed. . . Jesus, everything. He makes cartoon Waldo look like he’s under a rock.
Rexroth’s story is a hitherto-forgotten life, at the dawn of the 20th century: A child in a profoundly Midwestern and American radical community, the heart of an abolitionist movement and anti-conscription campaign that were pre-Communist Party. Imagine that! Before anyone even knew what a Bolshevik was.
This crowd was anarchist, Syndicalist, socialist, sexually progressive, and absolutely on fire with itself. Its radicals were marinated in Prohibition and determined to break the capitalist yoke by any means necessary. They were artists and adventurists inspired by a mass movement (yes, mass) that despised electoral American politics in a fashion that makes the cynics of today look naive.
You haven’t heard of American working men and women riled up like this. Never.
Rexroth concludes his life’s first half, arriving in California in the summer of 1927:
At that time, during the third week of our stay in San Francisco, Sacco and Vanzetti were executed.
A great cleaver cut through all the intellectual life of America. The world in which Andrée and I had grown up came forever to an end.
Let me read you a little bit, so you can discover for yourself what a wild ride I’ve been on:
